


Freedom Rains

by Charolastra



Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: Alcohol Poisoning, Angst, Bitterness, Cemeteries, Death Anniversaries, Drinking to Forget, Grief, Grieving, Parties, Pettyness, death by consumption, post eacker-hamilton duel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 05:10:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20700485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charolastra/pseuds/Charolastra
Summary: A few years after Philip's shocking death, George Eacker follows him to the pearly gates, the cause being alcohol poisoning.At the celebration of his life, Alexander and Eliza are, understandably, cautious.Alexander drinks just a little too much and decides to visit the man himself.





	Freedom Rains

White marble flooring merged pleasantly with pristine white walls, scored by beige accents and curling symbols and sprawling fleur de lis. Simplicity being the peak of beauty. 

As flowing as the designs were the drinks in the annual Summer Celebration; A ball, where hearty laughing, toping, dancing and chatting were encouraged and commonplace.

Sophistication demanded, from those attempting to perpetrate it, a certain interest in one drink; A weak champagne. The glittery, half-filled flutes were abundant about the many hands in the room, easily distinguishing the social class of the majority. The minority held graciously filled cups of sparkling appearance and contents like muddy gold. 

Elizabeth Schuyler-Hamilton held the former in her porcelain digits. She sipped gently, blues observing the gentle tilt of the liquid as it flowed between her lips. Alexander Hamilton, sat beside her at a little table preferred the ale. Strong, bitter ale that chased away sorrow like nothing else.

Except for tonight.

Not tonight, when he was plagued by the reminder that his son was gone. Young men like philip were surprisingly in surplus. Or not so surprisingly. As common as the young men were the beautiful young women, giggling as the men fawned and bickered over their bodies for each exciting song the band dragged out. Philip could’ve been any one of them, but Alexander had carefully picked out one man who was so striking in manners, so similar. A boy by the name of William, as he overheard the chatting women. Gentle, yet flirtatious, he danced about the room several times to one song, always crossing the length of the room with a different woman each time. 

His third drink came right when he decided to leave.

As he pondered the condensing bottle at his fingertips, Eliza’s hand gently closed around his palm. When Alexander looked up, her head was turned away from him. Long black hair concealed the little bit of white lace on her blue dress.

“I see you watching him,” His wife murmured, sad and empathetic in their own rights. Gingerly, her thumb ran back and forth along his cracked knuckles.

He hadn’t been watching.

At least, that was what he insisted as he rose abruptly from the metal weave-back chairs. Snatched the bottle. Fled, despite the little pleads of Eliza to stay for “One more dance, then we’ll leave, my love.”

So now he was out in the mid-afternoon sun, strolling, a little haughtily, down a street. Carriages trundled carelessly by him. He paid no mind. He paid no mind to anything, actually; he must have left that usual awareness, that paranoia, back with Eliza.

The glimmering liquid sloshed and raved about in its confinements with his steps, clasped firmly in the male's digits. The drink was having more fun than he was. 

Walking still, the red-haired man raised the bottle into clear view. He watched the bubbles swarm and pop at its surface in a far less relaxing way. Instead of the calm fizzing of the champagne, these presented like tiny conflagrations, dotting the sides with spray, then reacting almost furiously to itself. The immigrant’s blues softened with the enthusiasm of the effervesce. How similar Alexander was in grief. 

Anger roared like a little trapped explosion, arresting the catharsis so desperately needed--like opening a bottle. And when it calmed, it left...him. A disgruntled old man with a backdrop so sad.

In the now calm sandy-brown bottle, his reflection glowered back at him. He turned the bottle gingerly. As he did, it showed, in distorted pieces, his face. Something Alexander hadn’t taken time to witness in a while. Though the image was jumpy with his ungainly walk, the full view could be pieced together quite easily.

Lines trailed from the edges of his nose to the sides of his mouth. His eyes were underscored with purple-tinged wrinkles. Salt-and-pepper stubble crawled along the length of his sharp jaw, around the gentle curve of his lips, up his cheeks--on which rested stray lengths of his hair. Once red, now a silvery grey against his face. His hand rose up to his cheekbones, where he then pushed back the strands and probed with a hope for something youthful in his visage. Alas, save the once-lively blues, now tenebrous with sorrow, there was little to be found.

And it melted his expression to a little frown. The trick of dizzying ichor in a corked bottle.

What a change, he thought, from what he had been not four years ago. Youth had truly slipped from his hands. Oh, but what youth had he ever truly had? A rough childhood molded him into an adult far sooner than it should have.

That was why he had pushed his little Philip so. Why he stressed his good grades and his unfaltering attention to his schoolwork. That was why he had to be the overbearing father at times, and why Eliza was sometimes the gentle light in the darkness for his young boy--if not assisting in being the classic but gentler overbearing parent duo. Alexander loved him too much to see him do anything but succeed, sooner than he had, on better terms than he had. Philip, looking up to him as though he were the strongest in the world...taking his every word like an order from Washington himself...

He arrived at some unexpected destination only when something stopped him.

Not five feet before him, from humble, unkempt grass rose a fraying entrance arch. Mighty as it might have been, it was somewhat beneath an inspiring sight now; Festooned with innumerable row upon row of vines and other invasive plant life, the marble-grey stone of its construction was eroding and crumbling around the subtle bend. Little cracks, dangerously diffuse, made grim patterns in the workings.

At its curving apex, the picture of a weeping woman was carved from the rock; her delicate hands entombed a supposedly sorrow-filled face and her shoulders drooped most dramatically. 

The simple image ignited something rather sharp within the immigrant. Alexander felt a little tug at his heart, as though the carving was supposed to bring him some memory--perhaps a smell, a sound, a person. Though the echo was there, there was no real apparition in his mind; and it almost hurt to be unaware of the placement that little statue had in his memories.

So he kept staring at the statue. 

Despite the familiarity of the picture and the heart-wrenching emotions it plucked from the shut-off parts of Alexander’s swimming head, in reality, the carving was done most listlessly. There was no detail in her hair, piled up and held atop her head with a simple band of undistinguished fern leaves. There was no differing texture to the frozen body. Her clothes were shown by nothing more than a gentle lip above her visible shoulder, just below which ended the carving. It was not a piece of art to be revered. It simply was. Simply unspectacular, unastounding. As it should be.

But the lack of personality proved opportune enough to pin the woman's manners to Eliza. Most briefly, the immigrant wondered if his so adored wife had adopted that pose in the time succeeding Philip's passing, hunched in an unspeakable dolour.

...

He shouldn't. 

Despite the unextraodinary makings, its clear portrayal of wretchedness in the throes of grief was candid of its sobering contents. Either bravely, dumbly, or numbly, Alexander leveled his eyes with the horizon once more and strode through the arch.

The graveyard was as typical in its intimacy as it was from the outside. Tall graves, stout graves, and smooth stones, protruding from the Earth with a whisper of an unobtrusive “I am still here.” Some were ancient concrete blocks and some were pristine marble. Some, Alexander noted as he walked through the stiff grass, were the ever more somber lamb-topped stones. Families buried together with their youngest. 

He tried not to look at them.

The grass scraping carelessly against his shoes was springy, nearly sharp. They seemed to crunch under his feet as he walked, leaving behind the tiniest note of a footprint and a trail of soft sounds-- the susurrus of the grass against leather. Alexander wasn’t quite fond of the noise.

But up ahead..a spot rather bare of surrounding grass. It seemed to be around the diameter of a new grave.

Strange for him to rest there? Probably. Would he anyway?

As he approached with the smallest shred of caution, the dirt became darker, piled a little higher than the rest of the ground. The grass had yet to climb up the new marker at the opposite end of the line. He stopped in the well-trod earth right before the both, bottle swinging by the neck in his light grip.

Alexander stood before the perturbed dirt. His blues roamed from one piece of the scenery to another: burgeoning pink flowers with vibrant green stems leaning reluctantly against a tall white and grey patterned marble headstone, gently rounded on the sides and coming to a steep point at the apex; the engraving, bearing the usual date and name, then 'loved by many' below in sprawling calligraphy; The freshness of the dark soil piled in a long line from the headstone to where he now stood, pondering.

It seemed, for a long while, the older man couldn't draw his eyes from the earthen confinement. Damned be the emotionless look on his face; his inside were churning viciously with repressed melancholy none could see. Not that there was a soul to glance at his sorry figure and ponder the inner workings of him. Though there was that sadness, the anger about the realization that George I. Eacker was dead, buried right where he chanced a rest, there was also an augmenting shock. Shock that he had been laid to rest here of all places. The very coincidental meeting that didn't seem so coincidental, when Alexander thought on it.

Huh.

"Funny seeing you here." Alexander chittered at length. Just like that, the oppressive silence was gone. In the interim, it was somehow a relief to the older man. Despite the talking being his own. 

Alexander lowered his head. His eyes were riveted on the bottle clasped in his tan digits, and from the tops of his eyes, the blurred line of dirt was just barely visible. Like it was watching. He was, technically, speaking to the man who had publicly ridiculed him, harangued him. The man who fired a gun at his first child and hit his target. And he was so oddly gauche! He hadn't exactly been working on his entrances lately, not in the depressive state of himself.

But, Alexander rethought with only a little sheepishness, it didn’t matter. It couldn’t have been easy to hear him from six feet above.

Civility was also not required in the presence of Eacker. That much was for sure; he’d met the man when he was more than flesh and bones in a box. Not once did either man prove civility or passivity in their decorum. 

Needless to say, it was a decidedly brief conversation.

“What say we put those bad times behind us?” Alexander joked lightly. His voice carried well in the empty acre. “Not like they’ll be bothering you for a while, anyway.” 

Funny. _What a charmer you are, Alexander Hamilton. _

“I know just how.”

Alexander paced closer to the pile. The toes of his shoes edged dangerously close to the pile. Probably a little too close for comfort. Should he accidentally kick some of that stupid dirt...

"A cheers..." spoke the lion to the fresh dirt. At last, he had looked away-- just to guide his fingers toward the cork of his Samuel Adams. Patiently awaiting him.

"So a cheers to, eh..freedom..." In his curled palm, the cork creaked and groaned. After one twist it gave way with a _pop!_

"Good friends..." Alexander flicked the cork into the dirt, so obviously lacking care for the sacred plot--if not overt there, evidence lay in his malignant caricature of a toast, spoken as though he were a back to his debating days: with the bite of a silver tongue, coated in sugar. 

As he paused, Alexander suffered himself a swig of the ale. 

He supped a considerable amount, hardly making a face to pronounce the bitter taste it left once he swallowed. On the back of his throat, it glided smoothly, then left behind the most appalling sensation of swallowing a burning match. Once down, his jaws reopened with a haggardly breath. He swiped at his face with his sleeve. The burning engulfed the rest of him like a quick wave--then left him.

With the aftertaste leaving the sort of thrill that it did, he could see how Eacker had gotten a little lost in the bottom of the bottle. He smiled apologetically at the tombstone. 

'Loved by many.' The little twitch of hardly suppressed anger in Alexander's forced smile told otherwise. He gestured to the grave marker with the bottle and, derisively, almost sweetly, recited the last proposal.

"And young lives lost."

  
  


The sound of the alcohol hitting dirt was like a lovely summer rain.


End file.
